This is a good article by Andrew Keen about some of the ideas and meanings that have to do with the Web 2.0 movement and how it relates to the Internet today. Enjoy!
The second generation of the Internet has arrived. It’s worse than you think.
THE ANCIENTS were good at resisting seduction. Odysseus fought the seductive song of the Sirens by having his men tie him to the mast of his ship as it sailed past the Siren’s Isle. Socrates was so intent on protecting citizens from the seductive opinions of artists and writers, that he outlawed them from his imaginary republic.
We moderns are less nimble at resisting great seductions, particularly those utopian visions that promise grand political or cultural salvation. From the French and Russian revolutions to the counter-cultural upheavals of the ’60s and the digital revolution of the ’90s, we have been seduced, time after time and text after text, by the vision of a political or economic utopia.
Rather than Paris, Moscow, or Berkeley, the grand utopian movement of our contemporary age is headquartered in Silicon Valley, whose great seduction is actually a fusion of two historical movements: the counter-cultural utopianism of the ’60s and the techno-economic utopianism of the ’90s. Here in Silicon Valley, this seduction has announced itself to the world as the “Web 2.0″ movement.
LAST WEEK, I was treated to lunch at a fashionable Japanese restaurant in Palo Alto by a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur who, back in the dot.com boom, had invested in my start-up Audiocafe.com. The entrepreneur, like me a Silicon Valley veteran, was pitching me his latest start-up: a technology platform that creates easy-to-use software tools for online communities to publish weblogs, digital movies, and music. It is technology that enables anyone with a computer to become an author, a film director, or a musician. This Web 2.0 dream is Socrates’s nightmare: technology that arms every citizen with the means to be an opinionated artist or writer.
“This is historic,” my friend promised me. “We are enabling Internet users to author their own content. Think of it as empowering citizen media. We can help smash the elitism of the Hollywood studios and the big record labels. Our technology platform will radically democratize culture, build authentic community, create citizen media.” Welcome to Web 2.0.
Buzzwords from the old dot.com era–like “cool,” “eyeballs,” or “burn-rate”–have been replaced in Web 2.0 by language which is simultaneously more militant and absurd: Empowering citizen media, radically democratize, smash elitism, content redistribution, authentic community . . . . This sociological jargon, once the preserve of the hippie counterculture, has now become the lexicon of new media capitalism.
Yet this entrepreneur owns a $4 million house a few blocks from Steve Jobs’s house. He vacations in the South Pacific. His children attend the most exclusive private academy on the peninsula. But for all of this he sounds more like a cultural Marxist–a disciple of Gramsci or Herbert Marcuse–than a capitalist with an MBA from Stanford.
In his mind, “big media”–the Hollywood studios, the major record labels and international publishing houses–really did represent the enemy. The promised land was user-generated online content. In Marxist terms, the traditional media had become the exploitative “bourgeoisie,” and citizen media, those heroic bloggers and podcasters, were the “proletariat.”
This outlook is typical of the Web 2.0 movement, which fuses ’60s radicalism with the utopian eschatology of digital technology. The ideological outcome may be trouble for all of us.
Continue to Page #2 of This Article of Web 2.0 Opinion
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